Core: Humanities and the Expressive Arts I

In this course, we will study writing as a community practice and read literary works rooted in site specific, documentary, and testimonial approaches. How does the gesture of listening to and writing of someone else's life story challenge our own perceptions, foster collaboration, and deepen empathy? How might we approach any story that is not our own? How do we begin to interpret the existing archive, the absent archive? As part of our community engagement, we will disseminate the impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic by reading through efforts to document community struggles as well as building our own archive of stories in collaboration with communities we work and live among. This course will investigate creative pathways into historical space, as well as what is means to remember and document lives in times of devastation and disaster.

Learning Objectives: -Building a robust writing practice -Engaging with documents, objects and archival materials -Developing site-specific writings -Writing in different modes and genre forms -Deepening understanding of the term "archive" especially in relationship to creative practice -Reading and discussing literary examples that takes up archival and documentary impulses